But still, it is not the only way of defining the charge for your work.  And in some cases, word count is just not the right method to estimate the work you have done.

Writers should not aim to create a long text, but a good one.  In that case, getting paid by word count may lead you to the longest novel you’ve ever written, but not the best one. So in her blog ”Should Writers Be Paid By Word Count?” Laura Spencer suggests setting the quote by word count range (for example, “around 3000 words” or “600 to 800 words”).

Translators’ productiveness may range depending on the text. For example, you can translate 500 words of an average text an hour, but get stuck with the same 500 words of technical text for good 3 hours. You can, of course, define the rates depending on the text specialization. Or, as Corinne McKay describes in her article “How To Set Your Translation Rates By Using Objective Information”,   you can set your rates per hour.

I hope you will be paid well no matter what you charge for.

I guess professional translators and other professionals often dealing with word count are well acquainted with this magic formula. Are you?

You may count your productiveness as, for example, 1 page per day. How much is it in characters? Characters with spaces? Lines? Being commonly asked to create text with certain word count, I still sometimes get lost. So I took a page of plain text with little formatting and the statistics is…

Just to keep in mind, the average one spaced page contains usually about 3000 characters or 500 words. Depending on the text formatting a page word count may include from 200 (large print) up to 600 words (academic book).

So, you need to count words in this PDF file in any ways. How can you perform this? There are two methods to count words in PDF file: free of charge and paid…

Let’s begin from the free of charge method. So, to count unrecognized PDF file, you need to recognize it at first. It is cool if you have already bought some good paid OCR program like Abbyy FineReader or if you have Adobe Acrobat Professional which has a built-in OCR engine. But we are reviewing free of charge ways to count unrecognized PDF file and therefore we need to get a free OCR tool to recognize your PDF file.

After searching for free OCR tools I chose FreeOCR because this program can recognize PDF files. FreeOCR can be downloaded from http://www.paperfile.net/freeocr.exe

After installation (by the way, FreeOCR requires the .Net Framework V2.0 from Microsoft installed) run the program. You will get a window like on the screenshot attached. To recognize PDF file, it is advisable to click Open PDF button, choose your PDF file, choose OCR language and then click OCR button. After recognition, export the text, which you have got, to Word.

Get some statistics using the MS Word built-in tool (in MS Word 2007 click Review > Word Count).

But I would like to draw your attention that downloaded FreeOCR has only English OCR language installed. More OCR languages you can find out on http://www.paperfile.net/ocr_lang.htm

So, let’s see the summary of this free way:

Pros:

1. Free of charge

Contras:

1. Time-consuming process.

2. Only English OCR language installed. Thus it is necessary to download the other languages from the web-site.

3. Small number of available OCR languages.

4. The program can recognize only one page per one time. Therefore you need to switch pages if you have more than one page in you PDF file.

5. Sometimes you will get mistakes in recognized file.

6. Recognized text doesn’t erase when you open and recognize a new document.

7. Due to the fact that software is free of charge, you cannot be 100% sure that it is fully safety for your information.

8. Not fully accuracy counting by MS Word.

Also you can submit your file to a free online OCR at http://www.free-ocr.com/ (OCR available only for English, German, French, Italian, Dutch or Spanish). This method has almost the same pros and contras as the previous method plus there is bigger risk for the safety of your information and you should wait while your file will be downloaded on the web-site.

I would like to notice that for all methods, which are considering in this article, you need to have a good quality and resolution of images in your unrecognized PDF file to ensure the most accuracy word count.

Now I propose to consider the paid alternative. There is software which has been developed especially for counting. As example, I will consider AnyCount 7.0 software. This program can count words, characters and lines in more than 36 formats. Also it can count words in unrecognized PDF files. To count such PDF file, you need just to choose it, choose a PDF Graphic Recognition language and click Count button. The program will recognize your PDF file and count it automatically.

You can evaluate the program downloading it from http://www.anycount.com/download.html

The summary of the paid way of unrecognized PDF files counting is the following:

Pros:

1. Time-saving process. You do not need to spend your time on recognition of the PDF file.

2. Support for more than 20 graphic recognition languages.

3. Accuracy counting.

4. Support counting for more than 35 formats. Therefore you will be able to use the program to count the most part of your files.

5. Developed by the reliable well-known software company Advanced International Translations Ltd. that develops  software for the translation industry (such as Projetex, Translation Office 3000, etc.) since 2001. Thus you can be sure that your information will not be used by third-parties.

Contras:

1. Paid

So, as you may see, the free variant of unrecognized PDF counting will be expedient to use as a temporary and quick one-time solution. If you need a quick and extensive word count (or any other statistics, like character and line count), it is better to use a professional word count software.

Although it may seem obvious that translators “do nothing with the numbers”, there are still situations when numbers add some very thorough work for translators:

1.   When numbers are to be translated (for example, change 123 to one hundred twenty-three)

2.  When numbers are to be checked or proofread, especially concerning large number massive

So if you are thinking on whether to include the numbers in your paid word count, just estimate your effort spent on them first.

Data:

We have two MS Word documents, 1 with plain text and 1 with different text objects included.

I decided to use 3 tools for quick word count evaluation: MS Word Statistics, online word count tool and a specialized word count tool.

Stage 1: Plain Text

Please follow my results on the screenshots below.

Total of 330 words

Total of 328 words

Total of 330 words (including 2 numbers)

Conclusion: the only word count difference is made by numbers. There are two of them in text, but I guess the translation client wouldn’t want to pay for them as for words if there are more.

Stage 2: Text+ different text objects (my document included text boxes, WordArt object, Shape, footers, headers and an embedded Excel table)

Total of 707 words (the possibility of counting textboxes, footnotes and endnotes in new MS Word versions is completely new to me)

Total of 431 words (see, it is supposed to be table in stead of white space)

Total of 865 words (including 28 numbers)

Conclusion: 707/431/865. Indeed, MS Word shows less word count results than specialized word count tool, but more than online word count engine.

As a translator, you will be paid

…very little according to online word count.

… more for 28 numbers, but underpaid for 130 words in text objects according to MS Word Statistics.

… according to the accurate word count in specialized word count tool.

General conclusion: if you work with plain text only and don’t care for the numbers, you may sure rely on any of the word count tools. But if your document is more complicated than that – well, the decision is up to you.

Those are my results. Maybe I should have included something else? Tell me

Currently there are no rules or system defining what instruments or scheme should be used for word count and different word count tools use their own schemes for word count. And the most important question here is what to count. Well, words, obviously, but it appears that different programs include different meanings in this single object.

Microsoft Word Statistics, the most common unspecific word counting instrument, considers everything between two spaces a word, be it a number or a symbol. On the other hand, Word doesn’t include in its word count statistics the text in text boxes or shapes, that may sometimes happen to add a significant number of words to your word count.

The specific word count tools are more accurate here. Usually, a user can define whether to count numbers or not and whether to include the text from additional objects to the word count statistics. The best word count tools are usually armed with word count opportunities in footers, headers, notes, footnotes, end notes, text boxes, shapes,  text in embedded and linked documents, comments and hidden text. Also they can provide the word count in a large number of file formats. For example, AnyCount counts text in 36 file formats!

It is also said that because of these differences the word count produced by specific word count tools usually scores more words/units than word count in Microsoft Word. But I guess I’d like to find that out myself and do some research on the matter. So just look forward to it!

Word count itself
‘The word count is the number of words in a document or passage of text”, says Wikipedia. I wouldn’t dare to argue, but would add that word count is often used instead of text count.

Text count
Text count, to follow Wiki’s scheme, is a number of  words, lines, characters (with or without spaces), pages or other defined units in a text.

Word
Yes. Although it may seem ridiculous, we often can’t define what actually a word for the counting engine is. For example, for Word processor a word is everything between two spaces, including numbers. Smarter word count tools can make the difference between the words and other symbols, allowing a word to be a word in its offline meaning.

Word limit
Is often used by editors to define the length of the desired text.

Source word count

As translators are usually charged per source word, a source word count is needed to know the number of words in the source text. If a translator can’t count words in a source text (i.e. hard copies), the payment is set by the target word count.

Target word count -

the number of words in a translated document.

Hope it wasn’t too many terms for 1 post. But I’m still wondering about all the “footers, headers, notes, footnotes, end notes, text boxes, shapes, embedded and linked documents, comments and hidden text”. Are you?

1. Make sure all the information is essential

If you have several points of view, find out if they are all equally important.

2. Join the sentences

Try joining sentences you think could be joined.

3. Cut the introduction

It is not the most important thing you have to say, is it?

4. Get rid of the scenery

Don’t be overly descriptive. When your heroine is “breathtakingly beautiful”, ideas “unbelievably outstanding” and the sky is “sparkling-blue”… Well, there is a risk your word count would be “absolutely and roughly violating the word count limit”

5. Consider the quotes

Although your speakers are worth quoting, maybe there is a chance to say it all in a couple of words without loosing the idea.

6. Use graphics

See if there are some points you can SHOW in stead of explaining.

7. Make sure your word count is accurate

Check your word count units (words, lines or characters, etc). If you have many text boxes or embedded documents, you may need the word count tool to make sure you meet the limit.

And if you already are a successful text-count-cutter, please share your own tips.

Word count: 254

But with the development of SEO people started to mix 2 essential content parameters — word count and frequency count. It’s pretty strange, since mixing them is like mixing time and distance in the speed formula.

Word count – is the total quantity of meaningful words (excluding tags) in the piece of text.

Frequency count – is the index of how many times a word or a phrase appears in the in the piece of text.

You can find an example of a classic frequency counter here and a word count tool here.

From the first look you may think that frequency counter outbeats word count software in functionality, because it counts both words and statistics. But if you put a tagged text into a frequency count tool you will disappointed to find that all the tags were also included into the word and frequency count.

So if you need to count the quantity of the meaningful words (excluding all the tags) to know the volume of the job done in the majority of the text and even graphics formats, you need a word count tool. However if you are writing a SEO optimized content and want to know, whether you have put enough keywords into it, you’ll need a frequency count web app.

But with interactive blogging the situation changed. Both private and publicly shared blogs stared providing the cooperation ground for writers at all levels. And how is all this related to the word count?

Well, everybody who tried writing something knows that having a general idea is one thing and writing at least an A4 a day is another. All writers, both beginners and masters, need writing discipline. So a group of guys, who “wants to improve their writing and like building web apps” built a perfect discipline training tool called Word Count Journal.

The idea is simple – first day you write 1 word, second day – 2, and at the end of the year you have 66,795 words (in case you write only what you have to and not more). Like guys say: “Little by little, through the power of series, the total of your written words will add up to more words than contained in the average novel.”

I do like the idea. Just think it over once again – word count of your everyday creative output trains you to write a page of unique content per day till the end of the year. By simply following the rule of writing 1 word more every next day you can become a commercial blogger, journalist or a prominent writer in the next 365 days.

I made my start here and today have exceeded the planned word count 21 times. Feel free to join the initiative and leave a link to your own journal in comments to this post, so we can exchange the ideas and become more prominent writers and word counters